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Description

What is
nginx?

nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.

What is
Microsoft IIS?

Internet Information Services (IIS) for Windows Server is a flexible, secure and manageable Web server for hosting anything on the Web. From media streaming to web applications, IIS's scalable and open architecture is ready to handle the most demanding tasks.

What is
Unicorn?

Unicorn is an HTTP server for Rack applications designed to only serve fast clients on low-latency, high-bandwidth connections and take advantage of features in Unix/Unix-like kernels. Slow clients should only be served by placing a reverse proxy capable of fully buffering both the the request and response in between Unicorn and slow clients.

How developers use nginx vs Microsoft IIS vs Unicorn

The original API performed a synchronous Nginx reload after provisioning a zone, which often took up to 30 seconds or longer. While important, this step shouldn’t block the response to the user (or API) that a new zone has been created, or block subsequent requests to adjust the zone. With the new API, an independent worker reloads Nginx configurations based on zone modifications.It’s like ordering a product online: don’t pause the purchase process until the product’s been shipped. Say the order has been created, and you can still cancel or modify shipping information. Meanwhile, the remaining steps are being handled behind the scenes. In our case, the zone provision happens instantly, and you can see the result in your control panel or API. Behind the scenes, the zone will be serving traffic within a minute.

Nginx is the webserver we use in front of the Unicorn application servers. We have multiple Unicorn workers for every application (depending on their performance requirements), and Nginx basically functions as a load balancer.

Nginx serves as the loadbalancer, router and SSL terminator of cloudcraft.co. As one of our app server nodes is spun up, an Ansible orchestration script adds the new node dynamically to the nginx loadbalancer config which is then reloaded for a zero downtime seamless rolling deployment. By putting nginx in front or whatever web and API servers you might have, you gain a ton of flexibility. While previously I've cobbled together HAProxy and Stun as a poor man's loadbalancer, nginx just does a much better job and is far simpler in the long run.

NGINX sits in front of all of our web servers. It is fantastic at load balancing traffic as well as serving as a cache at times when under massive load. It's a robust tool that we're happy to have at the front lines of all Wirkn web apps.

nginx acts as our main webserver, proxying all connections to our other servers (both Python servers and Go servers). We use nginx because it's crazy fast, and it's proven to be reliable for the entire time we've been using it.

This is a legacy system requirement. We have some portions of our website written in PHP. Normally this wouldn't be an issue but at the time they decided to use PHP+Windows they were also trying to use MSSQL databases (All the microsoft influence was due to some azure credits the company received early on). The particular driver they ended up picking forced them into using the mssql_* functions instead of PDO. This meant that the majority of the site used these rather outdated calls and replacing them was a rather large endeavour. So while we migrate some of the PHP backend away to various node.js api systems we are simply sustaining the existing PHP portions.